Money, Masculinity & Flow With Dane Tomas

Dane Thomas is the author of The Conscious Hustle and creator of the Spiral Clearing Process. He is working on some amazing projects aimed at freeing human beings from negative conditioning and exploring freedom in every sense. In this 45 minute interview we cover free-style rapping, failing quickly, creating an entrepreneur mind-set around money and wealth, and Dane’s ongoing journey to explore sexuality and masculine identity. Note: there is some artful swearing in this episode, and free discussions of bodily parts and functions.

What you will learn in this episode:
Dane’s definition of success
Danes’ path to personal development from being a graffiti and rap artist
How flow states are important for freestyle rappers
How to do what you love and get paid for it
How the Church programmed the masses to repel money and wealth
How to change your wealth mindset
How to put what you learn from books into action
Working with men, masculinity, and tantric practices

Transcript

Welcome to the Flowstate Performance Podcast,

Created for those committed to mastery and success.

Coming to you from Manly,

Australia,

We break down the science and philosophy of optimal performance so you can unleash your potential.

Welcome to the Flowstate Performance Podcast.

I'm here today with Dane Thomas,

The creator of the Spiral Clearing Process and the author of The Conscious Hustle.

How are you,

Dane?

I'm good,

Man.

How are you?

I'm awesome,

My friend.

I'm awesome.

So I'm down in Manly.

You're up in Byron Bay,

I believe.

I am right now,

Yeah.

Beautiful Byron.

Loving it.

Cool,

Man.

Cool.

Let me just kick off just with a question that I like to kick off with.

What does success mean to you?

I guess success to me,

And this is going to sound very Tony Robbins-y,

But it is being able to do what you want when you want.

That's a big part of it for me.

But I also think it's the feeling of that you're moving towards something meaningful and fulfilling.

So there's that kind of sense that my life is going somewhere.

That's kind of a big part for me.

I guess when there's times if I haven't felt successful,

Maybe I was doing something that I thought was important and then I'd be there going,

What the fuck is this?

I'm working this job or I'm building this business and it doesn't feel good.

It doesn't feel like I'm going somewhere meaningful.

So then I would feel like,

Well,

Is this really success?

I don't think it is and I drop it and try something else.

So yeah,

I guess it's a lot about,

For me,

A sense of fulfillment and that's a mixture between making a contribution in the world.

That's the altruistic beautiful,

Yeah,

I'm giving to others,

But also my own growth is getting met as well.

Is this a definition or an idea of success that you've always had?

Do you feel like that was the one that was taught to you or is it something that you've crafted or found out through life?

I think it's been refined gradually.

For me,

I probably had very normal senses of success as a teenager and then have the hot girl and do well academically or something like that.

I wasn't really on the agenda,

But just do well in the generic way and that all got scrambled.

I had some very teenage disruptions and some shit that went down that made me not have a choice but reject all that.

So then I had a void where I was like,

What is the point of this thing?

What am I trying to do here?

Just so we can place where you're at for the listener,

Can you just give us a quick run through of who you are and what you do?

I know it's a big question,

But just the headlines.

Sure.

I'm a 37-year-old man.

I think of myself as an author and a creative entrepreneur,

I guess is the best way to put it.

For the last five or six years,

That's taken place in the personal development space,

So coaching people around business,

Around wealth and worth,

Coaching people on how to clear up emotional blocks and dysfunction and that sort of stuff.

Then more in the last year or two has really taken a turn into working with men,

Working with sexuality and conscious sexuality and life purpose with men kind of stuff.

But rewind before that,

I was a rap artist for about 12 years who used to compete in rap battles and write songs and put out albums.

So I was on a very more artistic path and a sort of rebellious path for a good 12 to 15 years and that somehow led me into personal development and spiritual practices and a lot of kind of kooky stuff that the little graffiti writing,

Getting in fights,

Troublemaker would not have been planning.

I didn't see that coming but that's how it ended up.

Wow.

So talk to me about your rap artist poetry days.

So when you said that,

I straight away thought of Freestyle Rap.

I thought I pictured that scene in that Eminem movie and I guess I started thinking about Flowstate.

One of the most interesting research studies they've done on Flow was actually with a bunch of rappers and they wired them up.

They wired their heads up to those neurosensors and they basically compared the data from when they were reading lyrics off a page and they compared that to when they were literally creating on the fly just freestyling.

And that's my background.

My greatest asset was I am still a really solid freestyler and I've done that for probably 20 years.

I'd be on tour with my friend Jules and we'd have all these songs and I'd be like,

Can't we just make shit up instead and he'd be like,

Do we have a whole album to promote?

It's like,

Yeah,

But I just like it better when we play word games and punchlines and rhyme stuff.

I still despite moving out of that world,

I still freestyle and I still love that.

I jumped up and did a little comp in Melbourne last week and that part is still the purest part for me.

I'm writing books and I'm writing poetry a lot at the moment and I feel those energies kind of creeping back into my life as well.

Flow that you'll hear rappers talk about flow more than any other word.

It's sort of what the whole thing is about.

Yeah,

That's right.

Well,

Talk to me about what that's like because I've had these little rap offs with my friends and I haven't yet been able to slip into that flow state in this medium.

It feels really clunky to me and I guess it's just practice and lack of expertise and just not doing it enough.

But have you ever had episodes on stage where you can't slip into that flow state and then you do slip into that flow state?

What do you think is going on?

Very rarely if I had to like,

And the cliche,

You know if you watch 8 Mile,

They call it choking,

Right?

So in a battle,

It's like,

Oh,

This dude choked.

But I feel like by the time I got to the stage stuff and competitions and stuff,

I probably spent hundreds of hours in bedrooms and lounge rooms just rhyming words together over beats for the pure pleasure of it.

So I feel like those neural pathways are pretty well established.

It's like if you're a pro kickboxer and you're competing in a fight,

Very rare would you say that dude just stand there.

That doesn't really happen.

They might get gassed out or they might get – someone gets the better of them or something.

But if you've spent a couple of thousand hours plus kicking bags and kicking people and throwing punches,

It's kind of hard-wired.

So the quality of it might suffer a bit if you get sort of confused or thrown off and that definitely happened.

Like I did a bunch of battles in the UK that were jump off street battles and I did a bunch of those.

I was a bit out of my depth in some of them.

The way they were doing the medium and the way guys were talking,

I didn't have a clue what was going on in some of it and a couple of them were some of my worst battles ever because I was just fully unfamiliar with the terrain and the language and the whole thing.

But you'd still come up with something even if that something was a bit illogical or a bit corny sounding or something.

But usually I find it's still there and to even to jump up like 18,

19 years later,

I jumped up the other night in Melbourne and we're playing freestyle rhyme games and that sort of stuff and it's still there.

So I'm going to assume that my left-right brain know how to synchronize to do that activity and I'm probably never going to not be able to do it.

That's awesome,

Man.

I think it's amazing.

You're doing one thing,

The actual articulation of the words and then you're thinking the next sentence and possibly subconsciously thinking the sentence after that.

I just think it's remarkable.

Yes,

And I think it is a lot about the brain has been trained but I think there's also a letting go of concern for the outcome that probably comes with a lot of flow state.

If you're a tightrope walker,

You probably have a very good ability to not think about smashing your face on the ground and I think the early hurdle for learning how to freestyle is I don't want to say something stupid or I don't want to say like … Inhibition,

Right?

Yes,

Because I'd be a kid in Australia at some party and you're like,

I don't want to say bitches or guns or something but half of the rap that I've listened to is full of that language.

So at the very early stages,

You say some really stupid shit and you're like,

Oh.

Then once you get permission,

Me and my friends would be freestyling for hours about pyramids and space travel and chakras and meridians and all that kind of stuff because we had that language.

So once you got past the sort of amateur awkward stages of not knowing what words to say,

You'd end up somewhere interesting.

Yes,

For sure,

Man.

Oh,

That's so interesting.

I was just having a discussion today with a friend about flow and not being in flow and we really just honed in on inhibitions and surrender.

Such a key element and that's whether you're rock climbing or whether you're surfing,

You got to just get comfortable with the outcome and you got to surrender to that and that seems to be like the biggest catapult into flow states.

Yes,

Totally.

I would agree.

Cool,

Man.

Tell me about your book,

The Conscious Hustle.

I love the title.

I love the content.

Tell us a bit about it.

Yes,

So it's funny.

There's a pile.

I've got my last ten out of the box sitting here next to the computer so I'm kind of fondling one of them while we're talking about it which is funny.

And you can kind of hear the hip-hoppy urbaniness in the title.

Really I grew up not really wanting to have a job but having to take jobs to live.

I dropped out of school and then I went to uni and then I kind of dropped out of uni after doing about four years of studying really random stuff and not getting a degree.

I'd be working in like service stations and kitchen hand jobs and that kind of stuff but also running workshops for kids and hip-hop workshops for kids is where my business sort of stuff started.

And I was constantly trying to line up basically how do I do what I love and get paid for it and then as I got more into kind of I guess personal development and spiritual evolution,

How do I do what I love and get paid for it and use this thing as a path towards my own growth as a human being.

I've been thinking about this stuff for like 15 years so there's a lot of stuff in the book in terms of structures and maps for helping us understand the stages we've got to go through to pull that off.

But really the nutshell is we can use anything in our life as a mirror for our own growth so your relationship with your woman or your athletic or creative practice and your business can be the ultimate personal development mirror because all the shit that goes wrong in the business is a reflection of something in you.

All the stuff that is working is a reflection of something in you.

If you've got massive self-worth issues,

You're not really going to make any money because money is representative of worth so it's really hard to keep something around you that you don't feel you deserve and people who've got issues around expressing themselves really struggle to market and sell because they don't want to voice or put themselves out there.

So really I've been – I quit my last day job in 2012 so it's not that long ago.

It's only really three years ago but I had multiple attempts at various kinds of businesses and some had really failed spectacularly or not spectacularly and some had done a little bit okay.

When I left in 2012,

I went from like 50K a year job to a sort of 50K a month business in about two years and it freaked me out as much as the next person because that was just not my reality.

But a lot of the reasons that came together so quickly and so smoothly was because of the inner work that I've done in the last few years before that so I felt I realized I just knew what to do and I knew how to attract people's attention and I knew how to create stuff that delivered massive value to people and when I started bringing those pieces together,

It just flew and it wasn't because I've gone to business school.

It was because I've gone to like personal development school of just studying myself and looking at how can I improve the way I do things and so what it taught me was your business like everything else is a mirror of you and if there's an area that isn't working,

Then there's something you can look at in yourself that you're going to have to change or evolve and obviously there's technical skills.

Like if you don't know how to sell or market,

You're not going to have any clients.

If you don't know how to build financial systems and organization,

Your business isn't going to stick together.

I'm not saying it's all just some internal emotional thing but even your ability to go and learn those new skills quickly which you have to do in business says a lot about your mindset and your emotional makeup and your programming and stuff.

So yeah,

The nutshell point of the book is how to line up your path in the world in a way that's aligned on the highest,

Most abstract spiritual level and on the most basic day-to-day how does this work,

How does it make money,

How does it help other people,

That kind of thing.

So it really sounds like you're bridging two worlds or maybe they're not even divided but I mean it's a book that somebody who's not spiritual or has not done a lot of that sort of more esoteric practice can really absorb.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

I mean I feel like what I get told is by people,

Oh,

I'm not really into spiritual shit but I really like your work.

I don't really like poetry but your poems are awesome.

And I think the gist is I've gone deep into a lot of different very weird rabbit holes from Tantra to ayahuasca and psychedelics and personal development and whatever but the book is – there's a bunch of stories about me living in council flats in Manchester and me taking drugs and me doing whatever and then there's some really I think explained really simply understandings of why we are the way we are and how we get stuck in certain places and how to change that.

So it's designed – people who want to do business and want to grow from that and also the other end was kind of like conscious people for want of a better word maybe who are spiritual or healers or whatever who typically those guys suck at business.

So it's like what we tend to find is there's this division in society where people who have done well in the grounded physical real world struggle with these abstract high-faluting concepts and people who are loving being in the white light rainbow Buddha whatever world struggle with physical reality and the point of the book is that they're not really separate.

You can be a truck driver or a brickies laborer and have a spiritual path but you might not call it that and you can be a freaking reiki master or whatever and build a regular business that makes money and feeds your family and funds.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I hear what you're saying.

I guess we have lived in an age where there's been almost this paradox.

You're either a business person or you're a spiritual person.

You're either somebody that goes and chases the dollar or you go and live in Byron Bay and raise your goats and do the rest of it.

And I mean what a crock of shit.

You've got to look at firstly who made that division and I would say it's essentially the church.

It's like if you look at the Vatican and the Catholic Church but lots of other religious traditions but this idea that money is dirty.

Only bad people have money.

What's the quote?

It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven.

That's basically bad programming to keep people poor so that the church can keep the money in power.

This is like some freaking 14th century shit and obviously far,

Far before that.

So you've got this idea that money,

People who are doing the down-to-earth money stuff are not spiritual but if you look at all of existence and everything as a spiritual experience,

Then everything is spiritual and making money can be just as spiritual as sitting down and praying or meditating because you're here having an experience of what it is to be a being and why should the meaningfulness of that only apply to certain categories.

And that's the same like I've been doing a lot of work with sexuality and tantra and stuff and the same rules apply.

There's this idea that sex is dirty and it's like sex is one of the most beautiful and fundamental things of being a human and we can go into that and use that as a spiritual practice rather than being some monk who sits in a cave and tries not to ever touch his penis.

It's the same kind of thing,

Right?

Absolutely.

And look,

We've got very enlightened traditions who have gone down that path.

What about money though?

I'm curious about this because when I was in Peru,

I was just kind of like dumbstruck by how you had these sort of,

Obviously the Catholic Church went there or the conquistadors went there backed by the Catholic Church and they basically just did loads and loads and loads of bad stuff and there's just obscene wealth just all over the place and whilst abject poverty just outside the front doors of the church.

Is this,

When you talk about the church and money and these beliefs,

Have you traced other religions?

Do other religions in your opinion have these same kind of things going on?

Yeah,

They do.

I think the Catholic Church and the Christian model was probably the most violent and clearly intentional example of that.

And there's like,

What's his name?

Is it Quintilian?

This could be wrong.

I could be making this up.

But there's a book called The Papacy and it goes into almost the internal policies of the Catholic Church and one of them is literally we should keep them poor because then they won't question us.

So education goes along with it as well.

So basically as long as we have the education and we have the financial power,

People will believe what we say and they'll need to use us as an intermediary to connect to God.

But if you look into the Hindu and yogic traditions and stuff,

There is some division still there between the physical and the spiritual which still causes some shit because it's like saying the higher realms are all pure and they're just filled of light and this realm down here which is just dirty,

It's full of all the bad stuff like sex and money and whatever and violence and greed and it's like one of those things are actually the vehicle towards awakening and towards living a fuller life.

What if our job on this planet is not to pretend we're not on the earth but what if our job is to open through the density and I guess how I look at it is if you have to avoid an area of life,

You're not that masterful.

You have to not deal with money or not deal with sex or not deal with desire,

Then your spiritual framework is a little bit flawed because it hasn't equipped you for actually what goes on in the world.

Absolutely.

So what do you – this is potentially a big question and a big tangent that we can explore now.

But what would be the process for somebody creating a new relationship with money?

So let's just say somebody has been heavily conditioned and somebody subconsciously or consciously believes money is evil and wealth is for the dirty fat cats in the banks.

How do they begin to develop a different relationship with money?

Sure.

So the easiest thing I'm going to say is obviously go get my book The Conscious Hustle.

It's like $13 on Amazon or something because it explains it better in the first two chapters than I can in like two seconds.

But it's about starting to look at your conditioning and programming and I created a tool called Clear Your Shit which is just a way to clear and delete emotional blocks around any area of your life.

It's free.

It's online at ClearYourShit.

Com.

It's just a video training that you can learn pretty quickly.

But whether you use my stuff or use anyone else's stuff doesn't really matter.

The key is to start unpacking what are the beliefs that I've picked up like rich people are bad or I'll never have it or only such and such people deserve to have wealth.

You might think you've got none but when you start digging down deeper,

You realize I've got a bunch of reasons why I can never – I had thousands of reasons why as talented as I thought I was,

I was like I've got so much to offer but I've never had more than $50,

000 a year.

And I'd look online and I thought I was doing all right and I realized that's like the median wage and I'm like but I'm not average.

I'm really special and I still can't earn more than average.

And I just wasn't allowed.

So I think internally,

I wouldn't allow myself.

So I think it begins with unpacking what are the beliefs that you're running and then it follows into getting some new beliefs and redesigning what you think and what you tell yourself and there's a lot of – I read dozens and dozens of books about wealth and wealth mindset.

I went on a kind of crusade to like – my grandparents come from very poor background.

My parents went from being very working class to kind of middle class by like 40 plus years of really hard work.

So they did it the hard way and now they're sort of relatively well off and they have nice things and they live well but it was a tough journey.

And I looked at that and was like,

Well,

I don't want to have to do that but I can still feel I've got some of these old programs in there.

So I read a lot of books about wealth and wealth mindset.

All the rich dad,

Poor dad stuff was awesome.

That was a great starting point.

All Robert Kiyosaki's books,

Really simple but really start to get you thinking about what you've learned.

What else is in there?

What about Napoleon Hill's book?

Oh yeah,

For sure.

Yeah,

Think and Grow Rich is great.

John Demartini has a book called How to Make One Hell of a Profit and Still Get to Heaven.

That's amazing.

It's all about changing your perceptions of wealth.

There's a fun one called The Trick to Money is Having Some by Stuart Weil which is awesome.

It's really kind of cheeky way of changing how you look at it.

There's a lot of books.

If you type in wealth mindset,

There's a lot of stuff there.

Probably my favorite is a program by Eben Pagan called Self Made Wealth which he basically just goes to war on your limited beliefs around money and helps you just unpack and deprogram the whole fucking lot which I love this program.

So a lot of that stuff.

It's like retraining.

There's little blonde girls that play country music and they have super racist parents.

They're from Alabama or whatever.

They're like these cute little blonde twins and they just grew up singing racist songs.

It's like if you learn to sing and play guitar when you're 7,

You're just going to sing the words you get taught.

Then they got to 18 and they kind of separated from their parents and stopped singing a bunch of hateful KKK shit.

So it's a bit like that.

If you've been around people who have scarcity mindset which most human beings do and you've heard like you've got to go to school and get a job and you should work hard for money and it's really hard to do well in this world.

If you've heard that forever and ever and ever and ever,

You're going to believe it and it's almost going to seem crazy when someone says,

Oh actually I make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and I don't even work that hard and I do fun stuff and I spend four months a year like skiing and surfing.

It's going to be like what?

Fuck you.

You're like bullshit.

But then you meet another one and another one and you're like,

Oh these are good people and they've just been creative and been courageous and tried some different stuff.

Tim Ferris' 4-hour work week screwed with my brain when I first read it.

I was like,

What?

No way.

I'm prepared to work a hundred hours a week to make some money and this guy is like talking about systemizing everything and working four hours a week and stuff and it's like,

How could that be possible?

So I think it's just opening your mind to other models and being okay with being wrong.

What part of my growth as a person is like at every new level,

I realize heaps of the stuff that I thought I knew is just bullshit and heaps of things I learned in school or that I would watch on television or that my parents told me or whatever is not very good information and being open-minded enough to be like,

Are there people who live a healthy relationship with money and wealth and have a great time in life making heaps of money and doing good stuff and if so,

Who are they and how are they fucking doing it because I would like to do that.

Interesting.

So what about turning book wisdom into action because there's a lot of – I'm observing so many people out there who are just bombarded with information.

Yeah.

What are your tips?

Well,

I think – and it's funny how I got to this place for years and I was just an academic learner.

I just would read all the books and think about everything and talk about everything and that kind of held me back as an artist.

I would never want to write these albums but I never want to release them because I thought they weren't good enough and then I kind of came into business and I was struggling as a coach and I started looking at the people who were killing it in my industry and they were all just like rampant executors.

They run a workshop and I'd be like,

Oh,

The flyer isn't very good or like that's not a very good venue or something but then they run another one two weeks later and another one and another one and I could just see they were getting better and better and better and those are the guys earning maybe a quarter million bucks a year when I was earning like $20,

000 a year and I was like,

Whoa,

They just keep doing.

And I read this thing once that stuck with me which was they did a study of the best sales people and they tried to find the attribute that made the best sales people and it wasn't their personality,

It wasn't their confidence level,

It was what it was was that the best guys had the highest speed of implementation meaning when they learned a new thing,

They would go and try it out like not a week later like that afternoon.

So let's say they learned a new objection handling technique,

They'd be trying it out straight after they read the book and I kind of started trying to take that on where all these people go to these seminars and you see them at the next seminar and ask them what's changed since the last seminar and fucking nothing has changed because they just go and sit there and I was probably one of those guys and I just started thinking,

What if every time I went to one of these things,

I just learned one thing and did that thing.

So the most exciting insight that I get from some podcast or some book or just from talking to someone who knows what they're doing,

What if I just rather than making a dot point list of the 20 things I just learned like for example if you're listening to this podcast right now and there's heaps of ideas in there that are bombarding you,

Listen to it and go which is the one that has the most resonance that I could just try it out like right now.

I love it,

Man.

I love it.

It's so powerful because I really think that that's such an important point in this day and age because we're just getting swamped with information.

Yeah.

And we're just not actioning any of it because we have this paralysis thing going on.

Yeah.

And I've become like I read a lot and I learn a lot but I've also kind of become this kind of like attention Nazi.

People are like,

Oh,

You should read this book.

Oh,

You should go.

And I'm like,

Nah,

Nah,

Nah,

Nah until I hear something like a couple of times or something that really has a strong pull on me and I have a bit of a profile with the work that I'm doing so I'll get heaps of messages like,

Hey,

Do you want to have a coffee?

I'm just like I've got like really 4,

000 people on Facebook and a reasonable mailing list and it's like that and this kind of sound rude but it's like why would I just meet some guy like randomly for no reason?

This is so fucking weird.

So someone's like I've got this idea,

This is what I'm seeing,

It could benefit you in this way,

Have you got half an hour to talk about it?

I'd be like,

Yes,

I'm there.

Let's talk.

And it's like this – I feel like the filtering system has evolved because there's so much information and I mean I business coach a lot of people and one of the biggest things I'm doing is like bullying them out of being so philosophical about something they haven't done yet because it's like well,

I would do that but I'd have to market research and I'm like how about you just fucking put on a workshop next weekend.

Call 10 people,

Invite them.

I don't care if it's $50,

$20,

Just execute something and then you'll get feedback that you can build on and it's like that's the people that are really good at things that I've admired.

I realized I just dive in and start doing it and they make heaps of mistakes and maybe they read a book then after they've done some of it but like there are people reading hundreds of business books that are working in their day job that are never going to launch the business and it's like there's someone else,

Some of the older entrepreneurs that I've met,

They haven't read a single book.

They're just out there doing stuff and I'm like,

Oh,

This guy just figured it out and he just takes heaps of action and look,

He's got a thriving business because he just keeps moving forward and it's like I feel over time,

I've become less overly analytical and more like okay,

Fuck it,

Let's do it.

That attitude has got me a lot of interesting experiences,

Some of which sucked,

Some of which were terrible mistakes but those mistakes are starting to compound now and give me some wisdom about wrong turns and upgrades and lessons.

Interesting,

Man,

I think that's a really key takeaway for anybody that's listening.

Also interesting for you to note the compounding failures turning into wisdom.

Oh,

Yeah.

One of the biggest things I got from – so I was doing music and I basically wanted to build a record label or something and I didn't know how to do anything like that.

That's why I started reading entrepreneur books and I was reading Rich Dad,

Poor Dad and Robert Kiyosaki has both a rich dad and a poor dad and is able to compare their philosophies on life and his rich dad who isn't his real dad tells him to go get a sales job and he goes and gets a sales job and he sucks at it.

So he calls his rich dad in a moment of despair after doing it for like three months and just being terrible and his rich dad is like,

Well,

The solution is simple.

You need to fail faster.

He's like,

What?

He's like,

Yeah,

You should take a second sales job at night so you can make more calls,

So you can make more mistakes so you get this.

And he's like,

Oh,

My God,

That sounds awful.

But he does it.

So he's doing like door-to-door sales in a day and he starts like dialing for dollars for charity at night.

And after another month of that,

Something in his brain starts to compound where he just gets it because he's just sucking so bad so much that the lessons are just compounding and it's like I roll Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I train Jiu-Jitsu and I train it really casually like a couple of times a week and I'm not amazing but I'm all right.

And then I know guys that train like eight times a week.

And the learning curve that they're on is completely different because they're just forever getting their ass kicked and assimilating new mistakes and upgrades and improvements at a far different trajectory than I am.

But then I look at it as a skill that I desperately want that is a key part of what I'm doing.

So I'm learning a lot of different tantric practices right now.

I'm learning video production,

Other things that I'm going to bring into my business next year.

And I'll just go all in and just fuck some shit up and make some crap.

But then not ignorantly but then sit back and look at it and go,

Oh,

Okay,

What do I need to learn?

What's missing?

What's missing?

And you'll improve so much faster.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

Sounds exciting,

Man.

So you're learning some tantric stuff and you're learning some video production stuff.

You put those things together and my imagination is going crazy.

That's where it's that tantric form with like full animations of like the energetic orgasms coming out of the bodies.

That's awesome.

And look,

That segues nicely to the topic I wanted to talk to you about because I know that you have been feeling more called into doing work with men.

And when I say that sentence,

It sounds not like what it is but sort of exploring the masculine identity and things like that.

Just talk to me about that.

Yeah,

So it's been a journey that I've been on personally for years.

I guess technically every man has but I have had a strong curiosity about what makes a man a man,

What is masculinity.

I got into a kind of a sexuality journey in my late teens,

Early 20s where I had some weird experiences where I had orgasms that were non-ejaculatory orgasms.

So I had strong orgasms where I didn't ejaculate and I was like,

What the fuck was that?

No one told me about that.

So I read a book called The Multi-Orgasmic Man which is a sort of Taoist Chinese medicine style manual for men to have different kinds of orgasmic experiences.

That kind of got filed.

That was something I was into in my early 20s.

Then I kind of got into the pick-up thing in my mid-20s like how to meet more women and how to be better with women and all that kind of hoo-ha and did a lot of workshops and had a lot of random experiences and that sort of stuff.

And then kind of found my way into in my late 20s,

Early 30s,

Tantric practice number one and men's work number two.

And those two things have enriched my life and probably changed me more than anything else.

Last year,

I ran a program called The Integrated Man where we took 12 dudes.

I have a program based around archetypes which are basically primal identities.

So in The Integrated Man,

We journey through the beast,

The lover,

The warrior,

The king,

The poet,

The magician and the god.

And they're all different aspects of what it is to be a man.

So the beast is the raw,

Physical,

Animalistic wild man,

Yeah?

The lover is the emotional,

Passionate,

Connects with the feminine,

Connects with women,

Connects with sex and artistic stuff.

And so the warrior is probably not needed to even explain.

It's the execution or getting shit done,

Kicks ass,

Super focused,

Facing death part of the masculine identity.

And through journeying these archetypes,

Different parts of yourself emerge and it's possible to really quickly and powerfully develop parts of yourself that you don't think you have.

So you meet some guy who doesn't feel in touch with his warrior aspect.

Maybe he's a desk jockey who hasn't really ever been in a fight and feels like he lacks sort of killer instinct.

But it's like through certain activities and unlocking certain parts of himself,

He starts to find that he actually does have a warrior energy with inside him.

And through working through those energies,

I saw like 12 men,

Myself included,

Just radically change,

Changing how we show up in the world,

Changing how much money we make,

Change how we impact our female partners or our sex lives change.

So that was sort of on the back burner while I was building the spiral and the clearing kind of movement stuff.

And that sort of feels like it's sort of mature now and I've got another book coming out about that in a few weeks.

But once that's done,

I'm going to move hardcore into the integrated man next year.

I've already started coaching men,

Like only men.

And we're working on stuff like life purpose,

Mastery of all areas of life,

But also around sexuality,

Sexual mastery,

Orgasm mastery,

Basically better performance in the bedroom,

But also how to manage and handle the feminine,

How to deal with women in a way that isn't like,

Fuck,

She's crazy.

Being the interplay of masculine,

Feminine dynamics is I think a big thing that's going to come in in the world in the next sort of 5 to 10 years that we don't as a culture understand very well.

So what do you identify as the problem?

What is it with our culture that is not right in this regard?

There's a few big chunks.

One of them is that men are not connected to other men very well.

So if you read one back three,

Maybe four generations,

Boys go to work with their fathers and they have uncles and grandfathers and male neighbors and friends around.

So there's this kind of transmission of masculine energy of what it means to be a man,

Right?

Whereas what happens since the industrial era is like little boys go to school,

Which is a very clean,

Sanitized environment.

It's quite a feminized environment and they learn to read and write,

Which is obviously that's quite functional and great.

But they don't connect with the father.

The father is a sort of separate entity and not for every man ever,

Depending on how they've grown up.

And you'll find guys who've grown up on the land maybe have a healthier connection to their fathers and stuff.

But in general,

Our culture doesn't have a strong bridge between father and son.

And it also doesn't have a process of initiation.

So like I realized when I was 30 that I was like a 30-year-old boy.

I was like,

Oh,

Something not never really like I've grown physically.

I've grown emotionally in a lot of ways and mentally and stuff.

But there was never a clean cut off that today is the day I became a man.

And that's another piece that's missing.

And then I think there's no high level understanding of how sexual energy and sexual polarity works.

So men and women each have a masculine and feminine side.

And most men and women don't know which side they're accessing when and they don't know how to deal with the other side when they're around.

So men are constantly like,

Whoa,

It's really weird when my wife does this or my girlfriend does this or women do that.

And it's like it's not fucking weird.

She's in her feminine.

That's why she does that.

And you're in your masculine,

So you're trying to make it logical or you're trying to get to the goal or the outcome.

And if you look at things like Tantra and the Hindu traditions and Tantra and Buddhist traditions as well,

They got these principles at work and that these principles of masculine and feminine or you can look at Yin and Yang or Shakti and Shiva sort of ideas.

They're at play the whole time.

And when you understand them,

It gives you a framework to get why men and women have different disconnects and what makes when we have amazing sex and amazing sexual attraction and why it's so good and when we lose that,

Why is it gone and how do we get it back.

And we live in a society that is completely unaware of this and kind of is a neutralizing society.

So sex is everywhere.

It's in film.

It's in advertising and so on and it's talked about and used to sell everything.

But we're actually terrified of it.

Like a bear penis or a vagina is like,

Oh my God,

Do that at the beach.

Oh my God,

I can't believe you just said vagina and penis.

You know,

It's like or a cock or a pussy or whatever you want to call it.

It's like I've swum naked and had someone go,

There are children at this beach.

And it's like children are not going to be upset by a penis.

They don't know.

You haven't installed all your fucked up shame yet.

So they don't know that.

It's actually an adult perception of what a penis means which is overtly sexualized.

So basically we're so sexually repressed that we can't handle a lot of parts of ourselves which is the cause of a lot of sexual dysfunction,

A lot of abuse,

A lot of all sorts of crazy shit.

So basically those three things are my biggest things.

And then also just the conditioning around gender that we have in media is very confusing.

Men are supposed to look like he-men and women are supposed to look like Barbie and a lot of us don't look like he-men or look like Barbie.

So we're confused.

And it's like well if I'm not that,

Does that mean I'm not a man or is there another way that I could be a man that is still functional?

And it's that combined with that we're not connected to other men in the real world or the way men do connect whether it's through like a sporting club or down the pub doesn't really have a framework for full honesty,

Vulnerability.

They're not going to talk about their sexual problems.

They're not going to talk about their lack of direction in life,

All the stats about male suicide and depression are that it's through the fucking roof.

And a lot of that is because men don't have culture and containers and vehicles in which they can communicate what's going on for them because your men are fucking men up and not be sad.

That's some gay shit.

And it's like oh that's a completely psychologically dysfunctional set of rules.

So no wonder with where many men are struggling in a lot of areas.

Absolutely.

And it's so raw right now.

When you consider our civilization,

Some of these things are just happening.

We're at the forefront of these things.

That generation that you talked about,

The older Aussie archetype man who's just blatantly homophobic and is terrified of appearing gay,

That's real.

That's here.

That's happening.

That's now and that's like – so that rubs masculine connection out of that thing because you can't put your hand on your bro's back because that's a bit fucking gay.

But it's actually like – it actually dysfunctionalizes men and then it affects the way that men touch women because the only time you ever touch anyone,

There's a sexual connotation in it.

So everything is kind of compartmentalized and fucked up.

We're in a really complicated time and we don't even understand our basic drives and our basic essence.

So what's the value in men or women or just genders gathering together to figure this stuff out just by themselves?

Amazing question and super apt for me and I'm imagining that might be why you're asking it.

So we came before last,

I was at a gathering in Victoria called Menagee,

160 men went to a wilderness gathering and there were workshops on men's health,

On sexual practice,

On dealing with emotions,

On communication,

On all sorts of stuff,

Yeah?

There's also a bunch of kind of rituals and entertainment and different stuff.

But really what it was,

I've done a bunch of this work and I've never hung out with 160 men in an environment that was open,

Honest,

Supportive.

The amount of healing that went on to people that maybe had some shit with their father or maybe they got bullied in school or maybe they were a bully in school or maybe they've only ever dealt with men in a competitive context or list a dozen other things that were the same stories again and again and to see yourself reflected back in dozens and dozens of other men in different shapes,

Size,

Ages,

Cultures,

Dispositions and realize,

Oh shit,

We've got – when you talk and you've realized we've got all the same challenges even though this guy is a little kind of scrawny little older dude who's got four kids and whatever and he's very quiet and I'm kind of a bit loud and a bit whatever and then this guy is this big athletic kind of would have been like one of the football jocks in my school kind of hierarchy and to connect with him and talk with him about same challenges,

Same challenges with this woman,

Same challenges with work and trying to be successful.

And so a lot of the division between men dissolved and a lot of healing took place just from being outside of the world of bullshit ideals of what men are supposed to be like because what you realize is men are like whatever men are like.

There's this kind of dropping of the pretense of like men will be strong,

Men will be this,

Men will be that.

And also you could see a lot of natural strength,

A lot of natural humor,

A lot of natural masculinity and so getting this healthier sense of what that is and what you're part of.

I mean I have people I follow on YouTube like Elliot Hulse who's like a conscious bodybuilder dude,

Amazing guy.

And there's this first kind of fire,

Gathering around the fire and a bunch of dudes had their shirts off and like I realized out of 160 men,

There was not one who looks like this dude I follow on YouTube who is like a ripped super beast.

And I was like,

Oh,

I just realized I've been comparing myself to a standard that might be one out of 20,

000 men have that physical body.

And there's a lot of healthy and athletic dudes but there was no one who looked – this guy is like a bodybuilder strong man with great genetics who looks like he could just rip your arm off.

And in the back of my head,

I'm like that's what I want to look – I'm supposed to look like that.

And it's like – that's just one little thing but I felt it drop and be like,

Oh,

All these dudes are men.

And every one of these physical bodies is a valid expression of what a man could look like or a man could move like or talk like.

And this is like holy shit,

I hold so many stereotypes and rules and I'm putting them on other men but I also am putting them on myself at the same time.

So I think the level of freedom and self-acceptance that comes from that is huge.

Yeah,

I'm really feeling that,

Man.

And I think that I will definitely check that event out next year because I've also been feeling called to this kind of – this – yeah,

Men's work I guess you'd call it.

Totally.

There's just so much confusion out there.

It's like what is masculine?

What is feminine?

What is feminine?

And it's just this huge – it's almost like our culture or society has created some androgynous blob.

Yeah.

And I mean a lot of that is kind of – has happened naturally in the kind of post-feminist,

Post-technology era where we're not cave people.

Strength isn't – physical strength isn't the defining factor of what a man is anymore.

Women can do things that men can do which is on an equality level,

Great.

On an identity level,

If you still want to have healthy masculine and healthy feminine and men and women who relate well to each other,

There needs to be an upgrade and okay,

What's a deeper understanding of that identity because I'm still a man.

I'm still different than my girlfriend.

We're not the same.

We're the same in some aspects as humans but we're quite different in a lot of aspects of our gender and our biology and our psychology and stuff.

But what about our identity?

Are there rules?

It's like,

Well,

Men are supposed to do this and are supposed to do that.

So are they really though?

Do they have to?

And if I don't do that,

Am I still masculine?

And what's a deeper thing I can plug into that is my sense of masculinity and David Dada,

The way of the superior man is one of the most powerful works on this that everyone I know who has done this kind of work loves.

And really,

He's bringing it down to like presence and purpose are two of the traits that define masculine energy.

When a man knows where he's going and knows what he's trying to achieve,

There's a sense of intensified masculinity around him.

It's why women find the DJ or the bartender or the bouncer or the guitar player is more hot than a guy who's just stood there.

He's fucking doing something.

I never thought about that.

He's got a purpose here.

I'm just here to stand around but that guy is fucking playing and just on stage,

It's like he's got a purpose.

That guy is standing there stopping people from smoking on that corner.

He has a function compared to the guy who's just getting stopped from smoking.

What's he doing?

He's doing nothing.

He's just wandering around.

That's amazing.

That's amazing.

Dane,

We're going to have to wrap it up but I just feel like we could chat for hours on all of these topics.

I want you to basically just quickly explain how someone can learn or potentially be coached by you or how they can just learn more about some of the things that you've been talking about.

Easy.

So two main avenues to get hold of me.

One is my Facebook which is Dane Thomas,

My personal profile which is really active.

So I'm sharing articles,

Starting massive arguments with people,

Sharing poetry,

Sharing workshops,

All that kind of stuff on there pretty much every day.

And I also have a website which is dantomas.

Com.

Thomas is T-O-M-A-S.

There's no H so dantomas.

Com.

You can contact me through the website.

You can contact me through Facebook and I'm going to be running a string of sort of one day and two day workshops across at least the East Coast of Australia and Victoria next year.

And I also am right now launching coaching programs for men.

I'm taking 10 dudes for the first half of 2016.

So you can contact me at – I'll say it in English – contact at dantomas.

Com is my email.

So you can get hold of me through website,

Email,

Facebook.

Awesome.

That's great.

Okay guys,

Well we'll end it there and just make sure you check out www.

Flowstatecollective.

Com because we'll put a full transcript and we'll put all the links,

All the resources,

Books,

Websites,

Authors,

People that Dane and myself have chatted about today.

We'll put links to all of that stuff so you can find it there.

If you like the show,

Make sure that you share it with a friend.

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Okay,

See you later.

Thanks for listening to the Flowstate Performance Podcast.

Check us out at www.

Flowstateperformance.

Com for more inspiration to unleash your potential.

Reviews

Wow!! That one was amazing!!!